that looks like it could change your life

said the guy next to me, of the giant slice of carrot cake I'm eating at this cafe in Bedford Stuyvesant, New York.

There's a smell of onions in the air so strong it pricks my eyes. I take big sniffs. Onions, coffee, soup, wafts of the street outside. Air crammed with the smell of life. The total opposite of the air I breathed yesterday, the remnants of which I'm pushing out of my lungs.

Wow

South Africa has just legalized same-sex unions.

The first African country to do so. Only one of a tiny handful of countries in the whole world to do so.

The kind of exhilaration, pride, joy, I feel, is hard to describe.

And wouldn't it be ironic if gay and lesbian couples from the US started to emigrate to South Africa? To petition for residence on the grounds that South Africa offers a fundamental human right denied to them in their own country?

airports

bring out the worst in me. Especially when people get territorial over seats in the waiting areas. Or take up 2 seats with their stuff at a crowded gate.

Yesterday, I spent 14 solid hours in airports and planes. Just getting from Iowa to New York, via Chicago. In theory, I should be able to whip out my laptop, connect to the airport wifi, get work done, as I sit around waiting for the 5th postponement of my flight. In practice, I ping-pong between:

I should walk, move my body – because I’ll be on a plane soon.
I should eat something – because we may be stuck on the runway for an hour.
I should browse the magazine shop, because that’s where I do my pop culture sampling.
I should return calls – who can I call in what time zones right now?
I should guzzle more water – I haven't drunk the 8 oz per hour of flying that I'm supposed to.

I’m so tired.

I hate airports.

I must be crazy to make my career in a field where travel is integral.

Here’s the other thing I hate about airports. I become the consumer I detest. Now that they confiscate water at security, I have to buy obscenely priced plastic bottles of it. With endless delays and cancellations, I always run out of fresh food, so I have to buy processed airport dreck in layers of toxic packaging.

OK - end of airport rant.

sugar snap peas and baby carrots

are the only vegetables I've eaten in the last 3 days.

OK, that's a slight exaggeration. My dinner on Thursday did include scraps of arugula. But in the land of endless cornfields, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, salads, vegetables, beyond the limp lettuce leaf and cherry tomato in the lunch boxes, are remarkably scarce. Last night, the group dinner was at a sports bar where every single item on the menu was deep fried and / or a large chunk of meat on a large wedge of bread.

My salvation has been the little bags of sugar snap peas and baby carrots I carry when I travel. And oatmeal - my other on-the-road staple. It's the only food almost universally available in America that you can get without additions of sugar, grease, and other gunk. It keeps fresh on the windowsill of your hotel room. You can even carry it yourself, as dry rolled oats, minimal space and weight in your baggage. Soak it overnight in rice milk or water, and it's delicious in the morning.

pitching Migritude

to people who have never seen it, heard of it, are totally new to even the concept, is a strange experience.

Last Sunday at this time, I was unloading props and materials at La Pena in preparation for the premiere.

For two years I've lived and breathed this work. It's integral to my waking and sleeping reality. And, increasingly, those around me have entered into the Migritude world, in different degrees.

So it's a little disorienting to go straight from the Bay Area buzz leading up the premiere, the roller-coaster exhilaration of the shows themselves, the rapturous response to them, to the NPN Annual Meeting, where I start from Chapter I:

Migritude is my spoken word theater show. Migritude is a word I coined to combine concepts of Migrant Attitude, to draw on the legacy of Negritude.............

climate canaries

is what a special report in the UK's Guardian calls Kenyan nomadic pastoralists. Apparently, they will be the first to be wiped out by climate change. Actually, that's present tense; they are already being wiped out by climate change.